Asana S-1 • Hacker News Board

Re: Asana S-1

#141

Post by tootie » Tue, Aug 25, 2020, 1:52 AM UTC

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #62

supernova87a wrote: post #16

Wow, this is a torrent of IPOs today. Investors / boards are wanting to get money out before things turn south I feel. Aside from that, I'm surprised how much it costs Asana on engineering R&D, for essentially a ticket management system. How does a team grow to ~300+ developers ($89M R&D) to figure out how to attach PDFs and videos to tickets, and email people when there's a change in status? (ok yes I'm oversimplify…

> How does a team grow to ~300+ developers ($89M R&D) to figure out how to attach PDFs and videos to tickets, and email people when there's a change in status? As with most of these companies, user-facing feature development is only a small part of the engineering workload. I would assume the majority of those engineers are working on less visible tasks: Devops, build systems, infrastructure monitoring, security, bac…

Ops and Infra should be a fraction of feature development though. Not most of your team.

Re: Asana S-1

#142

Post by john_moscow » Tue, Aug 25, 2020, 1:53 AM UTC

switch11 wrote: post #118

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sadly, I can confirm this is true. Most single-seat customers are fine, of course, but a very vocal minority can cause a lot of problems. I believe it's due to the mindset shift. If a team or company decides to use a specific software, people are more likely to accept the decision and learn to work within the tool's features and limitations. The cost of switching tools is high, so they tend to stick around for a long…

this is super true we also sell to both single users and to companies single users will write things like I will destroy your business you have no idea how many followers I have etc etc A single user with 10,000 followers on Twitter thinks they should be treated like they are GM or GE or Ford

Fun fact. If you don't reply at all, and completely ghost them afterwards, no matter what they say, the chances of them carrying anything out gets close to zero.

Re: Asana S-1

#143

Post by freehunter » Tue, Aug 25, 2020, 2:00 AM UTC

dcolkitt wrote: post #111

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How does a team grow to ~300+ developers ($89M R&D) to figure out how to attach PDFs and videos to tickets, and email people when there's a change in status? As with most of these companies, user-facing feature development is only a small part of the engineering workload. I would assume the majority of those engineers are working on less visible tasks: Devops, build systems, infrastructure monitoring, security, bac…

This makes a lot of sense. But in some ways it shows the downsides of the modern obsession with SaaS. How many of those jobs would be required if Asana was simply sold in a shrink-wrapped box that you installed on your desktop or the downstairs server run by the corporate IT guy. In some ways SaaS is a big win because it offloads all those tasks to a centrally hosted service. No IT guy or tower server in the corporat…

If it was shrink wrapped software they would need a bigger sales team, a bigger support team, a bigger professional services team, etc. It’s just trade offs.

Re: Asana S-1

#144

Post by freehunter » Tue, Aug 25, 2020, 2:01 AM UTC

thecupisblue wrote: post #69

supernova87a wrote: post #16

Wow, this is a torrent of IPOs today. Investors / boards are wanting to get money out before things turn south I feel. Aside from that, I'm surprised how much it costs Asana on engineering R&D, for essentially a ticket management system. How does a team grow to ~300+ developers ($89M R&D) to figure out how to attach PDFs and videos to tickets, and email people when there's a change in status? (ok yes I'm oversimplify…

IMO this will be one of the failed IPOs of the 2020. I understand (but not approve) 300 devs - they got a ton of integrations, enterprise client handling, lot of mobile, frontend and backend surface area to cover, lots of devops and support, teams to build new features, maintain tooling and so on... given time, any software team will slow down and scale up, unless it is specifically countered by the company. There's…

Many of the highest valuation companies are boring. Boring isn’t a bad word when it comes to enterprise software.

Re: Asana S-1

#145

Post by plorkyeran » Tue, Aug 25, 2020, 2:03 AM UTC

eloff wrote: post #77

supernova87a wrote: post #16

Wow, this is a torrent of IPOs today. Investors / boards are wanting to get money out before things turn south I feel. Aside from that, I'm surprised how much it costs Asana on engineering R&D, for essentially a ticket management system. How does a team grow to ~300+ developers ($89M R&D) to figure out how to attach PDFs and videos to tickets, and email people when there's a change in status? (ok yes I'm oversimplify…

There's always a comment here on HN wondering why company X has so many engineers for such a seemingly simple product. The answer is, unsurprisingly, not that they're terribly inefficient. Rather it's that running a popular service at scale is hard, the long tail of features is really a long tail, and a lot of effort goes into even simple things because small differences really add up when multiplied by large N.

Except for the part where even if you ignore the sales and marketing expenses they're barely breaking even. They're failing to make software for less than they can sell it for, and perhaps some of those hard problems which took 50 engineers to solve would have been better to have gone unsolved even if they lost some sales as a result.

Re: Asana S-1

#146

Post by vechagup » Tue, Aug 25, 2020, 2:04 AM UTC

ccheever wrote: post #95

gen220 wrote: post #60

Can someone in-tune to this world explain why Moskovitz purchases equity through a trust, in the form of convertible promissory notes? It seems like he isn't taking any compensation in stock or cash, but prefers to "invest" in the company's stock, through this trust and promissory-note scheme? If you're confident that the company's eventually going to exit (obviously a big "if"), and you have the cash liquidity (whic…

Since it isn't very anonymous and doesn't likely have any clear tax advantage, I think the mostly likely reason for the trust is just to avoid probate in California if he passes away. https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/california-avoiding-... .

Indeed. It's quite common to move your assets to a living trust in California for this reason, even for the only somewhat wealthy. It's basically SOP to set up a trust rather than just a will if you have assets above the simplified probate threshold. (I'm sure Moskovitz, being more than somewhat wealthy, has additional reasons.)

Re: Asana S-1

#147

Post by smabie » Tue, Aug 25, 2020, 2:09 AM UTC

eloff wrote: post #77

supernova87a wrote: post #16

Wow, this is a torrent of IPOs today. Investors / boards are wanting to get money out before things turn south I feel. Aside from that, I'm surprised how much it costs Asana on engineering R&D, for essentially a ticket management system. How does a team grow to ~300+ developers ($89M R&D) to figure out how to attach PDFs and videos to tickets, and email people when there's a change in status? (ok yes I'm oversimplify…

There's always a comment here on HN wondering why company X has so many engineers for such a seemingly simple product. The answer is, unsurprisingly, not that they're terribly inefficient. Rather it's that running a popular service at scale is hard, the long tail of features is really a long tail, and a lot of effort goes into even simple things because small differences really add up when multiplied by large N.

I mean, I think the real answer is that most companies use inexpressive languages with heavy emphasis on mutation.

Re: Asana S-1

#148

Post by vmurthy » Tue, Aug 25, 2020, 2:10 AM UTC

dcolkitt wrote: post #111

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How does a team grow to ~300+ developers ($89M R&D) to figure out how to attach PDFs and videos to tickets, and email people when there's a change in status? As with most of these companies, user-facing feature development is only a small part of the engineering workload. I would assume the majority of those engineers are working on less visible tasks: Devops, build systems, infrastructure monitoring, security, bac…

This makes a lot of sense. But in some ways it shows the downsides of the modern obsession with SaaS. How many of those jobs would be required if Asana was simply sold in a shrink-wrapped box that you installed on your desktop or the downstairs server run by the corporate IT guy. In some ways SaaS is a big win because it offloads all those tasks to a centrally hosted service. No IT guy or tower server in the corporat…

One of the subtle things about SaaS is far less "up-front" costs or fixed costs. This helps sell to business around the lines of pay-as-you-grow rather than commit to x years of SLAs. Shrink-wrapping software takes away this key sales lever and leads to longer sales cycle which might be part of the reason why SaaS models are so attractive.

Re: Asana S-1

#149

Post by rokobobo » Tue, Aug 25, 2020, 2:20 AM UTC

supernova87a wrote: post #16

Wow, this is a torrent of IPOs today. Investors / boards are wanting to get money out before things turn south I feel. Aside from that, I'm surprised how much it costs Asana on engineering R&D, for essentially a ticket management system. How does a team grow to ~300+ developers ($89M R&D) to figure out how to attach PDFs and videos to tickets, and email people when there's a change in status? (ok yes I'm oversimplify…

I think at least part of the motivation to IPO is that if the US has a new president starting 2021, said person has stated his intent to vastly increase capital gains taxes, probably starting with tax year 2021. Add to that increased corporate tax (which probably affects VCs' math, although I'm not sure how), there's probably a lot of people who would prefer to accelerate their taxable events.

Re: Asana S-1

#150

Post by dbtc » Tue, Aug 25, 2020, 2:20 AM UTC

dcolkitt wrote: post #111

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How does a team grow to ~300+ developers ($89M R&D) to figure out how to attach PDFs and videos to tickets, and email people when there's a change in status? As with most of these companies, user-facing feature development is only a small part of the engineering workload. I would assume the majority of those engineers are working on less visible tasks: Devops, build systems, infrastructure monitoring, security, bac…

This makes a lot of sense. But in some ways it shows the downsides of the modern obsession with SaaS. How many of those jobs would be required if Asana was simply sold in a shrink-wrapped box that you installed on your desktop or the downstairs server run by the corporate IT guy. In some ways SaaS is a big win because it offloads all those tasks to a centrally hosted service. No IT guy or tower server in the corporat…

Those downsides could also be considered upsides from a certain perspective: More work, more jobs; the industry grows.